At nineteen Kahlen has always been an obedient child, her father takes pride in his little girl and her mother appreciates her daughter's beauty which reflects back her own looks. When a sudden shipwreck and strange music drives Kahlen's family into the ocean the young woman is frightened and cries out for rescue.
Eighty years after her sinking and transition from girl into Siren, Kahlen has become weary of her duty. In exchange for one-hundred years of feeding Her, the Ocean has turned Kahlen and her fellow Sirens into somewhat invincible creatures. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century there are four young women serving the Ocean's need while She serves humanity.
The young women follow the tradition of sirens before them: calling humans to the ocean and their deaths with voices of beauty granted by the Ocean Herself. They must not reveal their secret, and any who hear their voices must be given to the Sea. She becomes a kind of mother and a kind of overbearing warden.
Kahlen has become restless in the years - the faces of her victims haunt her dreams. She blames herself while still caring for her sisters and the Ocean which they feed. While staying in Miami Kahlen keeps her silence, but also finds friendship with a young man studying at the local college. She understands there can be no relationship, but when Akinli can see past her extraordinary beauty and strange silence Kahlen connects with him.
She knows there can be no relationship because she cannot speak to him, and cannot reveal her secret to the one boy she wants to share it with. When their separation creates a rift between Kahlen and her sisters, and between Kahlen and the Ocean, the girl must discover if her love for this strange boy is enough to risk the wrath of the Ocean for her wayward siren.
The Siren is a story of acceptance and what one young woman is willing to do for love: of her chosen family and of a young man she barely knows, but with whom she shares a strange connection. Kahlen's story is as passionate as Cass's Selection series on a both simpler and more grandiose scale. Teen and Young Adult readers will enjoy this story of star-crossed lovers appropriate for even younger readers of romance. Kahlen and her siren sisters briefly approach the abuse known to young women around the world throughout the ages and the virgin-whore paradox which is rampant throughout mythology.
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